As cheap and versatile as all-in-one devices are these days, not everyone wants to pay for features they’re unlikely to use, and the humble monochrome laserjet still has a place in the market. Samsung boosts the range available with the new ML-1865; an extremely compact device (measuring just 341 x 224 x 184mm) finished in matt black and featuring fold-up input and output trays to keep things tidy when it’s not in use.

Those with little real estate on a desktop will appreciate its diminutive lines, but this is a fairly basic device, only offering a USB connection to a computer. There is a 150-sheet input and 100-sheet output tray and a manual duplex mode though, so you’ll still get a fair amount of use out of it without having to constantly reload paper.

Diving straight into performance, Samsung has quoted print speeds of 18ppm and we worked through a 10-page document in 42 seconds - or approximately 14ppm, not bad considering the basic nature of the device. The time to first print of 8.5 seconds was also spot on, and in terms of text quality it’s very impressive - crisp, clear and perfectly suitable for professional presentation. Graphics don’t fair quite as well, with some detail in gradients and subtle shades being lost, but again it should be suitable for most and simple graphs and tables appear fine.

One interesting feature of the 1865 is the One-Touch print, which is available directly from the device via a dedicated control button. This simply prints the screen as it appears on the monitor, with the key angle here being that it condenses everything into one page, so what you see is what you get, quite literally. We can see this being useful in terms of being able to arrange a document or various windows on a screen in a presentable way to produce a hard copy, and while it’s hardly cutting edge technology, adds a bit of extra appeal.

Despite the simplicity of the device, the 1865 still commands a relatively high price of around £80. Admittedly there’s some justification for this premium due to the small size, but we’d have liked it to work a bit harder in this area. This means that portability will have to be an important concern to justify the outlay over a basic AIO or a more advanced inkjet, and we can’t see desktop space being that big an issue for many people.

Verdict

The 1865 is obviously a very basic printer but it goes about its job well, being fast, offering excellent quality text prints and a useful little add-on in the One-Touch printing feature. If a basic yet usable monochrome laserjet is all you need, this is a compact and stylish way of going about it, but we do think it’s a little on the pricey side.